At a hospital ward, immediately after an aged stroke patient awakened, alarms sounded from the nursing stations’ computers and his family members’ cellphones. Nurses rushed to the ward to see the patient sitting up and ready to get off the bed. On another bed, a long-term patient had just received an operation for bedsores. Thanks to his bed’s smart mattress connected to a cloud-based nursing system, family members were reminded to turn him over at regular intervals and could remotely monitor his condition through an app.
“It takes between one and three minutes for a patient to get up off the bed, according to statistics, so it might be too late for caregivers to go to a patient who has sat up,” MedicusTek Inc. President Tony Hsu said.
According to Hsu, sensors in smart mattress can detect and send a pre-alert for a patient who turns over, awakens and rises before they can actually leave the bed. “Warning of one or two minutes could be crucial in heading off the risk of falling,” he said.
Clinical statistics shows that a patient, during their first three bedridden days, faces around a 30 percent risk of falling. After an average of 72 hours in bed, a patient’s muscle strength will weaken by more than 50 percent, leading to a sharp rise in the probability of falling to 60 percent from the third day onward. Under such great pressure, caregiving family members or nursing personnel tend to get exhausted from remaining continuously vigilant.
Hsu, 41, a former manager at Taipei City-headquartered AsusTek Computer Inc. with an ambition of starting his own business, observed that Taiwan’s complete industrial chains in the field of medical equipment boast long-established competence in the development of hardware, but are quite deficient in matching it with software. So, he began developing his idea of integrating medical equipment with information and communication technology. In these two sectors, Taiwan has accumulated great strength.
Toward the end of 2011, Hsu founded MedicusTek in Taipei jointly with three partners: Kevin Lin, also a former manager at AsusTek; C. Jason Wang, associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine; and Jonathan Tong, who graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At that time, the U.S. health insurance system just stopped covering the medical expenses of patients claiming for bedsore-related treatment of who had fallen from bed. As a result, many medical institutions began searching for effective countermeasures so as to reduce possible risks, thus creating a great business potential.
The partners started from scratch without knowing what to do except for trying to cater to the needs of users. After talking with a number of people who had been sick in bed for around 10 years, they found something like a smart mattress, then still nonexistent, could be quite helpful. With the help of big data analysis, they examined the movements of a patient leaving the bed and developed a system to detect potential bed exits. This enabled MedicusTek to emerge as the first smart mattress-maker from Taiwan to access the U.S. market.
In 2015, the company attracted investments from high-tech entrepreneurs such as Nicky Lu, chairman of Hsinchu City-based Etron Technology Inc., and T. H. Tung, chairman of Taipei-headquartered Pegatron Corp. In the initial painstaking stage of starting a business, Hsu and Lin, not from wealthy families, each sold a house to raise funds. With capital of just NT$20 million (US$661,336), they tried hard to seek cooperation with makers of sensor components, electronic modules, mattress and waterproof fabric.
But for a new company short on financial support and product orders, seeking cooperation was mission impossible. “When we began visiting factories, we were often kept waiting there for many hours,” Hsu said. “Fortunately, thanks to previous business connections, some of our friends at electronic module plants gave us a hand to help develop new products when orders were nonexistent.”
These product development efforts were followed by the challenges of clinical tests. “Through the help of relatives and friends, we worked with Taipei-based Koo Foundation Sun Yat-sen Cancer Center to conduct clinical tests, and obtained medical facility certification from the Republic of China (Taiwan) Ministry of Health and Welfare,” Hsu said.
Although the Taiwan market glitters with potential for the firm, it is the U.S. one where the lion’s share of its smart mattresses is expected to be sold. According to Lin, the U.S. is the world’s largest market with medical expenditure accounting for 18 percent of gross domestic product and annual business potential reaching US$3.2 trillion. In addition, the annual business potential for preventing falls at medical institutions is estimated at least US$700 million.
In the U.S., obtaining certification is a tough mission. “We’ve got confidence in our fireproof mattress, but were surprised to see the examiners test it with a powerful flamethrower,” Lin said. The partners never stopped trying before eventually securing certification for medical facilities from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Their products were soon accepted by Kaiser Permanente, which operates 150 medical organizations in the U.S.
C.T. Lin, CEO of Taipei-based Habitz Medtech Co. Ltd., previously worked at National Taiwan University Hospital’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. He said in recent years, along with development of medical technologies, relevant applications in such fields as robots, virtual realities and somatosensory, interactive games have proved effective in patient rehabilitation. In addition to smart mattress, moving robots and stairs-climbing wheelchairs can greatly reduce mental and physical burdens on caregivers.
In an aging society such as Taiwan, there has been a rapid increase in demand for care services. Currently, each nurse has to take care of 13 patients on average, marking one of the heaviest nursing workloads in the world. Due to personnel shortages, the nursing service sector is expected to see an increasingly wider application of the latest technologies such as those offered by Taiwan outfits like Habitz Medtech and MedicusTek. (E)
[By Lin Feng-qi / tr. by Pat Gao]